Education for Librarianship in the Next Century

published or submitted for publicatio

Context and Relationships: Ireland and Irish Studies

Students, editors, researchers, and the public are necessarily concerned with the context and relationships of names and topics found when reading texts. What other documents relate this topic? Where and when did this happen? What else was going on around that time and place? Who were the people and institutions mentioned? How were they related? What else did they do? This project will develop three tools: A Context Finder will find information in reference works about names, words, or phrases found when reading; a Context Builder will annotate texts with the source of information for the next reader; and reference works will be enriched by Context Provider to show where the names or topics were mentioned in texts. An international collaboration between the University of California, Berkeley, and the Queen's University, Belfast will develop these tools for texts relating to Ireland

The Physical, Mental and Social Dimensions of Documents

In the development of documentation studies at the University of Tromsø and the founding of the Document Academy it was asserted that one should view a document as having three complementary and simultaneous aspects: physical, mental, and social. These three document dimensions and relationships between them are discussed. Physicality is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for being a document, there must also be a mental angle, which, in turn, entails a social (cultural) angle. The physical disposition of documents is influenced by social controls. The inability of any one angle to fully characterize a document explains the role of documents in the social construction of reality and why “relevance” in retrieval evaluation can be understood but resists scientific treatment

What is a "digital document"?

The question “What is a digital document?” is seen as a special case of the question “What is a document?” Ordinarily the word “document” denotes a textual record. Early this century, attempts to provide access to the rapidly growing quantity of available documents raised questions about which should be considered a “document”. Paul Otlet and others developed a functional view of “document” and discussed whether, for example, sculpture, museum objects, and live animals, could be considered to be “documents”. Suzanne Briet equated “document” with organized physical evidence. These ideas resemble notions of “material culture” in cultural anthropology and “object-as-sign” in semiotics. Others, especially in the USA (e.g., Jesse Shera and Louis Shores) took a narrower view. Old confusions between medium, message, and meaning are renewed with digital technology because technological definitions of “document” become even less realistic when everything is in bits

Interrogating spatial analogies relating to knowledge organization: Paul Otlet and others

The author provides an examination of how ideas about place and space have been used in thinking about the organization of knowledge. The spatial analogies of Paul Otlet (1868–1944) in relation to his overall vision are traditional and conventional. Notions of space, place, position, location, and movement are frequent in the work of other leading innovators (Martin Schrettinger, Melvil Dewey, Wilhelm Ostwald, Emanuel Goldberg, and Suzanne Briet) concerning specific practical aspects of knowledge organization. Otlet’s spatial imagery is more original and more ingenious when applied to technical problems compared to his overall vision.published or submitted for publicationOpe

The Kinamo movie camera, Emanuel Goldberg and Joris Ivens

The design and characteristics of the compact spring-driven Kinamo movie camera (1921) are explained. The career and achievements of its designer, Emanuel Goldberg (1881-1970), are summarised, including his efforts to promote and popularise film making. The avant-garde filmmaker Joris Ivens was significantly influenced by his experiments with the Kinamo camera and also by Goldberg personally. Ivens used the Kinamo camera to film De Brug, Regen, Borinage, Indonesia Calling, and other films. Other uses and users of the Kinamo are noted. Copyright © John Libbey Publishing

From Bibliography to Documentography

There is ambiguity in the use of the term bibliography for both the study of printed books and also for the listing of accessible intellectual resources. We address this ambiguity by examining two well-known anomalies: Donald F. Mckenzie’s assertion that bibliography should extend to all media, including culturally significant objects in the landscape and Suzanne Briet’s declaration that an antelope in a zoo is a document. This paper summarizes and extends an earlier, more detailed discussion (Buckland, 2018)

Before the Antelope: Robert Pagès on Documents

In 1951 Suzanne Briet wrote, with minimal explanation, that an antelope could become a document. In 1948 Robert Pagès (1919-2007) published an explanation of the same and related ideas. Textual and other graphic documents are about something, hence descriptive and derived. Animals and other objects are informative because they are illustrative of themselves either as specimens of a class (tokens of a type) or simply as particular individuals (“autodocuments”). Pagès’ career and ideas are briefly discussed

Introduction to Robert Pagès’ “Documentary Transformations and Cultural Context”

Robert Pagès (1919-2007) was an anarchist activist who later became director of a major social psychology research laboratory. Between these roles he was a student in documentation established in Paris by Suzanne Briet and others at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers. In 1947 while he was a student of documentation Pagès submitted a thesis entitled “Transformations documentaires et milieu culturel” (Documentary transformations and cultural context) which was published as an article in the Review of Documentation in 1948. A key theme was that documentation is to culture what machinery is to industry. This introduction situates and explains some key ideas from Pagès\u27 article